From messages in bottles to fields of plastic: welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog discussing humanities pollution of the worlds oceans.

We rely on the worlds oceans for a variety of reasons. They regulate our climate, they give us oxygen, they give us food. But we've turned our oceans into a plastic trash can.

This blog will investigate mans affect on the hydrosphere, with particular emphasis on the role of plastics based pollution. During the course of this blog I hope to discuss a range of subtopics: pollution variation, environmental concerns, ecological concerns, current management schemes and future predictions.

Humanities domination over the Earth system began on a global scale with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. During this time capitalism emerged, production yields intensified, populations expanded and consumerism developed. Mans exploitation of the Earth's resources was unprecedented, as was his ingenuity and his environmental pollution.

Presently the range of pollutants that humanity produces increases with each new invention. During the 1960s and 70s pollution in the worlds oceans was dominated by pesticides and herbicides, in the 1980s and 90s it was polluted by horrendous oil spills (Popularmechanics, 2015). 

Now there is one main pollutant which is having astronomically detrimental affects on the worlds oceans...

Plastic. 

Plastic based products have only been in production for around 60 years and so their effects as oceanic pollutants have a brief history. But that is not to say that the physical dimension of the problem is small, as plastics account for 60% of all marine debris and affect every ocean on the planet. On a temporal scale plastics are predicted to remain within the ocean for between 10-100 years due to the plastics durability and non biodegradable properties. 

Plastic pollution within the oceans has detrimental results for marine environments, with a range of affects, from creating marine 'dead zones' spanning tens of kilometres, to individually affecting marine fauna. Within science there is a general consensus that the increased levels of plastic pollution have lead to a number of species becoming endangered. Thus, humanities corruption of the Earth system has lead to some rather drastic suggestions that we are creating the 'great sixth extinction phase' (The Guardian, 2015).

See video below for an introduction of the proposed topic (Video courtesy of the US Department of State).